


The Knowing

by pyrimidine



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-09-06
Updated: 2011-09-05
Packaged: 2017-10-23 11:32:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/249842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pyrimidine/pseuds/pyrimidine





	1. 1.

It comes and goes.

That’s the strangest part, the part that’s truthful enough to make Cobb inclined to believe in Arthur’s legitimacy. He most likely would have hired him either way, since they’re overstaffed with acrobatics but short on the mystical. At least, that’s what the reviews have been saying. Arthur’s been keeping track through various newspapers around the country.

“So tell me what happens if you start your act and you don’t -- ” Cobb flutters his fingers in the air in lieu of assigning a name to what Arthur does. “ -- you know. What then?”

“I can fake it.” Arthur shrugs. “I’m good at reading people.”

He proves it that very first night, when the spotlight lands on a pale, reedy-looking woman in the third row, right next to the aisle. One of the dancers escorts her into the ring, where Arthur is waiting on the center platform. She says her name is Marie, from Talking Rock, Georgia.

“A small town, I’m guessing,” Arthur says with a wry smile. He gets far more laughter than he should be warranted.

He instructs her to put both hands in his, and then to close her eyes. The crowd is hushed and the tunnel of light shining down on him drowns out everything else besides the sight of Marie and her pale eyelids.

Arthur concentrates, but nothing comes. He’s not really surprised. If it were to happen at all, it already would have, as soon as he’d taken her hands. So instead he quickly notes the chain around her neck and the tiny cross that sit against her ribcage; the bitten-down fingernails and slightly matted texture of her hair. When the spotlight had initially lit on her, her neighbors had clapped politely, with none of the excited recognition of companions.

“There’s been a recent death in the family,” Arthur starts quietly, laying down his first stepping stone; when her throat moves in the affirmative, he skips to the next one, and continues to carefully feel his way through the dark.

*

That summer is a hot one, enough so that Arthur is thankful they travel the roads after dark, even if he’s now slow and groggy in the mornings. A drought is spiderwebbing lines through the earth wherever they go; he gets used to squinting, to dust clinging to his shirts and matting it with a soft shade of tan while his suspenders press lines of heat onto his torso. It’s tempting to slide them off, but he tries to refrain the best he can.

The troupe isn’t large by any means. Still, Arthur keeps his distance from the other performers. Bearded women, contortionists, and illusionists seem quite run of the mill if you know where to look or how to drag their secrets out. But people like Arthur cause discomfort. He understands why, of course, and doesn’t hold it against anyone.

Mostly he spends a lot of time with the animals, feeding and petting and reaching through the bars of the more dangerous ones, his breath held tight in his chest. Yusuf, the main animal tamer, almost always lets him do so, and Arthur thinks a lot of is because there’s a very real and exciting possibility of Arthur’s fingers meeting a violent end.

Every night, he looks into the dim faces of the audience and chooses someone to come into the ring. Sometimes he feels only the dry rasp of their hands in his. Sometimes he closes his eyes and sees the most fantastic things.

*

Cobb is a relatively reserved ringmaster, leaving most of the flash and glam for the performers to set for themselves. After introducing the show, he slips into the dark and up the narrow ladders so that he’s only ever a few feet away from Mal as she walks the tightrope, ready to catch her when she swings in from the trapeze. Robert, her partner, whips through the air like a bird swooping from its perch. Together they make a formidable duo, all dark hair and long limbs. Arthur has to turn away whenever Mal arches her torso out and stretches her arms, waiting, waiting -- he doesn’t know how Cobb watches.

The animals are arguably the biggest attraction, but Arthur never sticks around for the whole act. He’s been witness to too many accidents, which is why he falls out of this world from time to time. He comes back into the tent for the stunt acts that follow, though, and then it’s his own turn, a small pocket of time that could be considered a lull before the illusionist’s closing act.

The Great Enigmatic Eames saws women in half, disappears with a flash of his cape, and pulls various animals out of hats. It’s all par for the course, but he also throws in acts that Arthur has never seen before: getting strapped into a straitjacket and locked into a box before performing a quick-change with his assistant, or appearing to be a mere reflection in several mirrors placed around the ring.

Arthur studies him more carefully than he does the others, though he really shouldn’t. Premonitions are hardly correct most of the time. They could be misinterpreted in countless ways, or even meaningless. It’s a faulty gamble at best.

Still, he watches until Eames gives his final bow and the lights plunge out.

*

(“Pleasure,” Eames said.

As soon as they shook hands, Arthur felt a soundless jolt. He must have gripped tighter by instinct, because Eames made a noise and stepped forward, bringing his other hand up to bookend Arthur’s hand between his.

“You’re alright?”

“Yes,” Arthur fumbled with the word. “Yes, thank you. Sorry.”

He walked away, shaking his hand out with quick movements.)

*

Ariadne throws knives so flawlessly that almost everyone in the troupe has, at one time or another, stood as a silhouette for her to trace. Arthur has seen her wobbling back and forth on the tightrope as well -- no doubt she has a propensity for excellent hand-eye coordination. Over the past few days, she’s started to seek Arthur out, becoming more and more confident with each interaction.

They’re sitting in the partial shade of an oak tree when she says, “What do you see for me? You know. With your mystical powers.”

She laughs, but only to cover up genuine curiosity. Arthur pulls at a bunch of dead grass, freeing them from the dried dirt.

“I don’t really see scenes,” he explains. “More like -- ”

He pauses, because with Ariadne, he’d seen a palette of soft colors bleeding into darker ones, or maybe vice versa, all mixing together in swift lines. It’s rarely more specific than that. The quick transition could mean anything: movement, escape, windfall.

“Tell me,” Ariadne coaxes. She rolls over onto her stomach and props her chin up on her fists. “Please?”

Before Arthur can answer, a shadow falls over them both. The smell of cigarettes is strong in the air as Eames says, “Having a kip?”

“Arthur’s telling me my fortune,” Ariadne says boldly.

Eames squats down and exhales a column of smoke. He nods at Arthur. “Go on, then.”

“I don’t mind,” Ariadne says when Arthur glances at Eames.

“There’s,” Arthur clears his throat, “there’s a lot of colors, light and dark. They mix together pretty messily. Quick lines, stuff like that.”

“Well, what does it mean?” Ariadne prods.

“Movement, usually. Escape. Maybe you left someplace in a hurry. Or maybe it’ll happen sometime in the future.”

Ariadne hums consideringly. “You mean I’ll leave the circus?”

“Maybe,” Arthur repeats.

“What good is ‘maybe’?” Ariadne teases.

Eames pretends to cuff her head. “What good is having your fortune be set in stone?”

“Forewarned is forearmed,” Ariadne recites. Her gaze narrows and she lifts her chin a bit. “What about Yusuf?”

Arthur looks at Yusuf in the distance. “I see blue, which usually means calm or serenity. But I feel red, which -- ”

“ -- makes complete sense,” Eames finishes with a grin.

Arthur offers him a smile as well. Part of him is waiting for Eames to ask his turn, but he never does.

*

Sometimes, if Arthur’s lucky, he’ll be able to scrounge up two or three men from the audience to play cards afterward, while people are still packing up their things. Most of them tell him they don’t need help, shoo, so Arthur ends up standing around with his hands in his pockets more often than not.

“Eights full of aces,” Arthur announces, a cigarette drooping from his lips as if to point to his winning hand when he spreads it on the empty crate.

One of the men nudges his friend after they both toss in their cards. “Hell, I just thought it was a stupid circus trick.”

“I warned you against gambling with a mystic, didn’t I? I wasn’t lying,” Arthur says. “I’m all about good will and honesty.”

He flashes them a quick grin, then gets up from his makeshift seat, which is actually an overturned feeding jug that Yusuf uses. From the meager pile of bills and coins in the middle, he pockets only a few. “Compensation for the cigarettes,” he explains, because the pack tucked into his waistband is more than half empty now.

“Yeah? And is that,” the man gestures to the leftover money, “because of good will or honesty?”

“Whether or not I was conning you, reading your mind, or just plain lucky, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?” Arthur starts walking backward, his shoes crunching over bits of gravel. “Have a good night, fellas.”

When he turns around, one of them grumbles, “Some mystic. Kid looks like he should be sitting in the corner in grammar school,” and he smiles to himself in the dark.

*

One night, after everyone has gone to bed, the soft glow of an oil lamp diffuses through the sleeping caravan. When Arthur peeks his eyes open, he sees Eames’s face, half hidden in shadows.

“Hello,” says Eames.

“Can’t sleep?” Arthur asks.

Eames tilts his head in response.

 

He leads Arthur around to a dead stretch of road and teaches him how to breathe fire. The process involves little more than moonshine and the tidal volume of lungs, but the result is brilliant columns of orange that light up the entire field, as if a ghostly sun is blinking in and out, in and out. Arthur manages to catch only a glimpse of the scene each time -- the sprawling fields of wheat stalks, the slate grey of the road, the light sheen of sweat on Eames’s forehead.

They stumble back, drunk on the moonshine and adrenaline, and by that time the air is beginning to shimmer on the horizon. Eames goes off in search of water while Arthur weaves through the line of trailers. His feet guide him to the animals’, where inside it’s dark and silent. Combined with the high ceilings, it gives an illusion of coolness and he breathes it in deep.

Leah, the leopard, is awake and blinking at him. He walks up to her cage and curls his fingers around the bars. A faint taste of ash lingers in his mouth; he swallows it down as best he can, trying to shake off the heady feeling that settles in from being awake to experience one day sliding into the next.

He swallows again and thinks about his and Eames’s first meeting. The only thing he can compare it to is the time when he had almost fallen from the trapeze platform. He had been setting up the ropes when his foot had caught an edge and he’d slipped. By some base instinct, he had managed to throw his arms out and grab onto the other rope that had already been secured.

Hours later, he'd still felt like his heart was in his throat.

“Yes, it’s awful, isn’t it,” Arthur states out loud.

Suddenly, his neck starts prickling with the sensation of being watched, but when he whips around there’s nothing there, and the door is hanging open just as he’d left it.


	2. 2.

The circuit is supposed to swoop down past the Mississippi river in Memphis before digging back up the eastern seaboard, but there’s a crudely revised map tacked to the wall of Cobb’s trailer. A red line has them skirting along the Mississippi, only just so, hugging the water until finally crossing over at St. Louis.

Arthur taps at it. “Is this a recent change?”

“Fairly recent,” Cobb answers distractedly, trying to draw out a travel timetable. “People want to avoid any more hot weather as much as possible.”

“Right,” Arthur says, letting his skepticism draw out the word.

Cobb finally looks up and catches Arthur’s eye. “Well,” he says with careful enunciation, “if you really want to know, the Great Enigmatic Eames was lucky enough to catch the attention of both sheriffs and some gangs down South a while back.”

It’s so damn _normal_ that Arthur can’t help smiling. “Grifting,” he guesses.

“Illegal card games,” Cobb clarifies.

“Come now, they weren’t all illegal,” says Eames’s voice.

Arthur turns to find him leaning on the doorframe, the muscles of his shoulder bunched up against the splintered wood. Strange, how seeing him in the daytime overlays the previous night. Arthur almost feels like it had never happened at all. The reality of Eames now, his face dotted with dust and beads of sweat, hands clean of the ash marks that are still caulked into the lines of Arthur’s own fingers, makes it seem even more like a dream, or maybe a vision.

“You were only providing a safe venue for them to indulge in illegal activities, none of which you knew of?” Arthur asks.

“I consider it a humanitarian gesture to have helped out those men,” Eames states.

“It takes a con man of high caliber to orchestrate things to go so spectacularly wrong, I’ll give you that much,” says Cobb. “Don’t you have something or other that needs fixing?”

Eames straightens up. “To think that I gave up my philanthropic ways for a circus troupe with shoddy, ever-failing equipment,” he declares grandly as he makes his departure. Arthur watches his silhouette pass out of sight.

“I found him in New York, running the best damn shell game I’ve seen,” Cobb says after it’s clear that Eames has gone. “He hops around a lot, from what I’d wager. I just told him to give me a month’s notice if he decides to skip out on us.”

Arthur stands still as Cobb glances down briefly, then adds, “That request stands for everyone.”

“Noted,” Arthur acknowledges.

He busies himself with studying a photograph hanging beneath the map, one of a previous incarnation of the troupe. The edges are bleached and water-stained. There are a few recognizable faces, but none of them are of Eames.

*

Lunch is some sort of soup, along with a few pieces of bread and cheese. Profits come and go, as do the quality of their meals, but Arthur doesn’t mind. He gets his food and puts his tray down across from Eames, who’s snagged the table that sits in a pinch of shade. His eyes crinkle in greeting, but they eat in silence until Eames is nearly finished with his meal.

“So, Arthur,” he says. “This gift of yours.”

Arthur chews on his bread. “You’ve refrained from asking me to read your fortune so far.”

“And I won’t ruin that streak just yet. I find it more gratifying to discover things for myself,” Eames says, “and on my own.”

“Do you, now,” Arthur says.

Eames grins, then thumbs at the corner of his mouth. The arrogance is genuine, that much is clear, but it also conveniently acts as a cover for something sharper that lurks beneath. Stage personas are a strange thing -- during the act, it’s all spotlights and dramatic gestures and appearing to be a one-dimensional shell, existing only for the pleasure of the audience. The best acts make it easy to forget that there’s anything else to them.

“Sizing me up?” Eames asks shrewdly. “Or just pretending to?”

The quick pace of the conversation comes to a brief halt as Yusuf sits down beside Eames, but Arthur picks it right back up.

“Returning the favor, actually,” he says. He abandons all pretense, despite Yusuf’s presence. “I think you’re fascinated with me. This is the wrong way of indulging that, though -- which you know, of course.”

“But of course,” Eames repeats. “I wasn’t aware of there being an instruction manual. Apologies for that.”

Both he and Yusuf chuckle as he rises to deposit his tray into the bucket of lukewarm water that serves as a sink. “You’re infuriating,” Arthur calls after him, even though he feels nothing of the sort.

“Don’t take it personally,” Yusuf says. “Although he does seem to have focused in on you.”

“Who has?” Ariadne asks, settling down onto the bench next to Arthur. “Bread and cheese, I feel like royalty,” she says to herself, but she reaches across to snatch a piece of Yusuf’s bread, anyway.

He lets her do so, then asks, “Who else?”

“Fortune-telling _and_ luck,” Ariadne declares, cottoning on immediately. She cuffs Arthur’s arm. “You really did hit the jackpot.”

*

This time, when Eames lights the oil lamp, Arthur’s already sitting up in bed with his shoes on and laced primly. Eames glances down at them with a neutral expression.

“What is it tonight, then?” he challenges.

“Cards,” Arthur answers simply.

Eames’s eyes glitter in the half-dark. Arthur lets the misunderstanding hang in the air for a moment longer, then points to the card deck sticking out of Eames’s pocket and says, “I have eyes.”

“So you do,” Eames laughs.

They run through Texas and Omaha Hold ‘em, then a warped version of blackjack that has suspect rules smacking of Eames’s own invention. The tricks come afterward; Arthur has conned more than a few people in his lifetime and receives an eyebrow raise of approval from Eames accordingly, but Eames’s own sleight of hand is almost unbelievable. Arthur watches, rapt, at the fluidity of the misdirection and the speed at which Eames’s fingers move.

“I’d say you found your calling as an illusionist,” Arthur finally says, once Eames has moved on to simple card tricks. His heart is still pounding fast, heightened by the way Eames can draw in even an audience of one.

“They’re just stupid deceptions that anyone can learn,” Eames dismisses. There are four face-down stacks sitting on the crate, and Arthur flips over each top card to reveal an ace of every suit. “Shuffle these, will you? Lest they be stacked the next time you get the chance to arrange another card game.”

Arthur does so, and lights up a cigarette as Eames puts the deck back into his pocket. He wordlessly hands the cigarette off to Eames before getting another one for himself. The cherries burn slow, seemingly listless against the hot weather that lingers even now, and Arthur finds himself wondering if there are reasons why Eames always chooses to steal him away during the nighttime rather than in the sunlight.

When Eames speaks, his voice swims low along with the languid heat and the stillness of their camp. “I saw a mystic, once,” he says.

He tilts his chin and blows smoke rings up at the sky. Arthur watches them lasso around the moon one by one before folding away into the thick, humid air. Intuition is what makes him say, “A lot of us are shams, you know. Charlatans, emptying your pockets in exchange for lies.”

“Do you know already, then? What she said?”

“I don’t,” Arthur admits. “I mostly see fortunes for times to come, not those that have already passed. And even then, a lot of them are only in relation to myself and the subject. It’s a rather narcissistic fraction of the gift.”

There’s a rustling noise, and Arthur looks over to see Eames studying him with more candor than Arthur’s used to.

“What does it feel like?”

Arthur turns his head, looks back up at the sky. “Like dreams.” _Like this_ , he doesn’t say.

*

Yusuf eventually comes to accept Arthur’s help when it comes to caring for the animals. He bathes the smaller ones and scrubs down their cages the best he can, with far more detail than is warranted, but it helps his mind wander and he’s thankful for that, especially when a crowd brings with them an influx of images and colors in Arthur’s head.

One day, he’s elbow-deep in soapy water when he sees Yusuf scrutinizing him.

“Am I doing something wrong?” he asks, wringing out the sponge.

Yusuf shakes his head. “No, no. I’m just thinking -- ”

“Yes?”

“You could have joined up with another troupe, or a carnival. You would have made a lot more money that way,” Yusuf says. “Not that it’s any of my business.”

Arthur just shrugs.

Yusuf laughs. “So mysterious.”

“I don’t mean to,” Arthur protests.

“Of course you don’t. I believe you. But that’s what makes you all the more,” Yusuf pauses, then says, “ethereal, I suppose.”

“Ethereal,” Arthur repeats, then breaks into a smile and tosses a dirty sponge at Yusuf’s head.

*

More and more often, Arthur dreams about reds and blacks; he dreams about being wrapped around a warm, pliant body, the threads of the mattress pressing tracks into his skin, the smear of Eames’s smile in his periphery.


End file.
